The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond

by Howard Steven Pines

  “You read my mind, Chris,” replied Dmitri. “No reason to worry about violating the species Prime Directive, since it appears we’ve received a four-dimensional invitation to their party. Like you said earlier, as long as we keep Uber engaged, we’ll be shielded from the Coast Guard. Maybe they’ll even give up and leave.”

  “And I want to share this experience in the medium of the humpbacks,” Gorman said. “It’s the dive of a lifetime. There should gear on board. Are you ready to join me, Lila?”

  “Absolutely,” she replied. “I’m so glad you’d asked me to plan for a dive. There’s gear for four. Just like the old days. How about joining us, Melanie?”

  “You’re kidding,” bleated Andrew. “You want to expose yourself to two thousand tons of mathematical geniuses who’ve been persecuted for generations and have a score to settle with the persecutors?”

  Seema’s freaked-out expression caught everyone’s attention.

  “We’ll be okay, Andrew,” replied Gorman, “and don’t worry, Seema. Since our cetacean comrades are mathematicians and, for all we know, poets too, I don’t think they’d mind us sharing the experience of their very own Speakeasy discovery.”

  “So you’re saying they’ll welcome you with open fins?” replied Andrew.

  “No comment.” Like a Buckingham Palace guard, Gorman’s face remained expressionless.

  “I wouldn’t miss this opportunity for the world,” said Melanie. “I’m thrilled when my students make Speakeasy pronunciation breakthroughs, so I’ve gotta be there when Uber makes the connection between sight and sound. How about it, Dmitri? You mentioned you had diving experience. Wanna go for a swim?”

  “I’d normally be as petrified as Andrew, but this afternoon has thawed most of my inhibitions. I’ll shock all of you and just go with the flow.”

  “Very cool,” said Greg. “While you guys suit up, Andrew and I are gonna set up the video system.”

  While their colleagues prepared for the dive, the two men located the rolled-up, eight-foot-wide fabric screen tucked away in the corner. After they’d lugged it over to the observation area, Andrew climbed over the solid barrier railing and slid down into the sunken rectangular well area.

  “Careful,” said Greg. “Try not to step directly on the glass.”

  Two oversized panes of safety glass, framed in the center by a two-inch-wide support member, formed the super-widescreen view window. Greg lifted and lowered the sausage-shaped object, while Andrew, balancing himself on the structurally sound perimeter, guided it into position on top of the glass. Once he’d unrolled it to completely cover the eight-by-twelve-foot rectangular window, Andrew secured the screen with duct tape. Greg’s helping hand facilitated his climb up.

  An LED video projector had already been attached to the cabin ceiling. Secured by a jury-rigged assemblage of rubber clamps, metal brackets, and assorted nuts and bolts, the projector pointed straight down toward the glass bottom. A long video cable had been taped to the ceiling, one end plugged into Andrew’s workstation and the other connected to the projector. This improvised system would enable the same Speakeasy plots displayed above Andrew’s workstation to be projected onto and through the movie screen resting on the glass bottom.

  “The Coast Guard is still waiting for us.” Dmitri fussed over the final adjustments to his wetsuit. “So, please, Andrew, transmit the audio and video files of everything that’s happened, and maybe about to happen, to Professor McPinsky.”

  “Yes,” replied McPinsky, reminding everyone he was still on the line. “I need those files. I’ve been waiting my entire career for data like this, and I know just the special person I’d like to share this discovery with.”

  “Who might that be?” asked Dmitri.

  “Trust me,” replied McPinsky. “He’s the right person for this moment in history. Hopefully, you’ll all find out sooner than later. In the meantime, I envy your youth and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to swim with the ‘lords of sound.’”

  CHAIN REACTION

  The Pentagon, Virginia

  Three time zones to the east, Richard Prescott had decided to contact his Navy buddy, Ned Perry, for another friendly phone conversation.

  “Richard, I’m impressed,” said Captain Perry. “How did you persuade the Coast Guard to act so quickly?”

  “Thanks to your earlier suggestion, a lawyer friend in Oahu located the injured protestors in Maui. They’re hurt, embarrassed, and angry, so they were more than willing to file assault and battery charges against Dmitri’s team. You have news from the Coast Guard?”

  “Yes, I have a contact on the cutter that’s intercepted the PICES vessel.”

  “How’d you arrange that?”

  “Think ‘homeland security.’”

  “It’s my turn to be impressed.”

  “I wish I had better news for you, though. My contact says the PICES vessel is shielded by an escort of humpbacks. They’ll just have to hang tight until they can sneak through.”

  “Oh, no,” Prescott moaned. “But it might be too late by then. They could have the data they need to sink us all. By the way, it’s rather unbelievable to me that the whales are protecting them.”

  “I’m just telling you what they told me. Something remarkable is happening out there.”

  Now Prescott was flummoxed. What if it were true: a communication breakthrough with another species? And if he himself were thwarting it? Nonsense, he told himself, it’s a fairytale! “By the way, Ned,” he replied. “I appreciate you burning the midnight oil. Just tell your Coast Guard insider to seize the computers and the data when they board the vessel. As far as the law is concerned, Dmitri’s crew is guilty of assault on the high seas. If you can’t make that happen, then your sonar experiments could be ancient history.”

  “Copy that, Richard. I hear you. Bye bye.”

  Although temporarily relieved, Richard Prescott was dumbfounded that Dmitri and McPinsky had stymied him. Yes, they were quite clever, and he continued to admire their devotion to their profession. But he couldn’t be weakened by second thoughts. Those arrogant professors would not stoop to acknowledge the important contributions of SoCalSci’s administrators: people like himself, who successfully orchestrated the financing and functioning of the system that supported their dopey experiments, sanctioned under the guise of academic freedom. It was only a matter of time until he received official confirmation of Dmitri’s arrest. Then he’d initiate the next step in his plan.

  * * *

  Prescott’s admonishments had finally struck a nerve with Ned Perry. The latest dispatch from the Coast Guard cutter near Maalaea Bay, confirming the extraordinary marine mammal group behavior surrounding the PICES-chartered vessel, had pushed him beyond the tipping point. He could not sit idly by with the future of the sonar program hanging in the balance. It was an essential piece in the geopolitical chess game vital to the defense of the nation. He needed to disperse those whales and stop the potentially ruinous experiment. Now was the time to act. And he’d been lucky. The vessel that had conducted the recent battery of tests in Hawaiian waters was still cruising in the vicinity of the current PICES experiment.

  Perry stared out the window into the black void of the moonless night, the Washington Monument glowing in the distance. Though he’d never tell anyone but his wife, he deeply regretted the collateral damage caused by the fateful decision to conduct the tests at such intense power levels. He winced at the memory of his daughter’s tearful response to the much publicized death of the beached whale in Maui. Worst of all, he couldn’t tell a soul about the recent dispatches from the USSIA Satellite Imaging Agency. They’d confirmed that the ocean crop-circle patterns, linked to the group behavior of humpbacks, were a worldwide phenomenon. It was painfully obvious that the whales were far more intelligent than he had ever imagined. But he had a duty to perform.

  Perry sighed and sat down at his secure workstation. After he’d retrieved the GPS coordinates embedded in the dispatch from the Coast Guar
d cutter, he typed a coded message:

  To: Commander, U.S.S. San Fernando

  From: Pacific Fleet Command and Control Center

  Copy this:

  Urgent - Proceed to coordinates 20.759122,-156.457228

  Conduct - five minute test at half power

  Ping Duration - six seconds

  Ping Frequency - every thirty seconds

  Report back -Target signature profiles at beginning and end of test

  Over and Out.

  Just enough power to disorient and confuse the whales but not injure them, Perry reflected, as he pressed the SEND key. Perry’s coded message traversed the labyrinth of the U.S. Navy’s ultra-secure computer network, and then it was broadcast from the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Master Station at Pearl Harbor. Less than a minute after his final keystroke, the message arrived at its destination.

  * * *

  What an odd request, thought the commanding officer on the bridge of the U.S.S. San Fernando. He’d assumed that the classified sonar experiments were over, especially after the news of the beached humpbacks in the vicinity of the last tests. Now he had to deal with this puzzling new command with oddball parameters. His role, however, was not to question his superiors. He relayed the new orders to the operations specialists and recited the GPS coordinates to the navigator, who keyed them into the system. The good news was that they would arrive at their destination in about twenty minutes, complete the task, and head for home soon thereafter.

  THE TORCH OF PROMETHEUS

  Leeward Waters, Maui—thirty feet below sea level

  Dmitri couldn’t believe he’d summoned the chutzpah to dive amongst forty humpback whales. Since this had already been the most eventful day of his life, he’d decided to play with house money and chalk up one more adventure of a lifetime.

  Chris, Lila, and Melanie had already taken the plunge and now it was his turn. This would be his first dive in nearly five years. Unaccustomed to the weight of the scuba gear and the tight-fitting wetsuit, he devoted every ounce of concentration inching down to the bottom of the slippery ladder. He paused on the last step, clutching the railing, frozen in indecision. Sucking air through the mouthpiece, he struggled to control a choking sensation. A dormant childhood gag reflex had returned to haunt him. As he turned and saw the massive bodies poking above the surface, his heart pounded. Was he really going to go through with this?

  “Don’t think about it,” Greg yelled from the top of the ladder. “Just let go.”

  Dmitri looked up to a reassuring presence. Greg had always been there to support him and he needed his help now. Dmitri pointed at his friend and then at himself. Pushing an arm forward, he mimed a shoving motion. The message seemed perfectly clear to Greg. He took two steps down the ladder and braced himself against the supports. Flashing a mischievous grin, he pressed an outstretched foot into his colleague’s chest and delivered a gentle push. Dmitri fell backward and disappeared with a splash.

  It all seemed to happen in a panicky blur. Dmitri crashed through the surface with a jarring jolt, felt the water’s instant chill, and feared he’d never stop plummeting to the bottom of the sea. Arms and legs thrashed in the struggle to regain his equilibrium. His teeth tightly clamped to the mouthpiece, he fought in vain to subdue persistent throat spasms. Why had he thought he could do this? He’d already swallowed a cup of saltwater. The briny taste nauseated him, and he was beginning to shiver. He’d better get it together, before it was too late.

  Seeing Melanie drift into view, he remembered her advice when they’d donned their wetsuits. She’d coached him in a yoga breathing technique tailored to underwater emergencies. Closing his eyes, he focused on the memory of her words and the sound of her voice. Counting slowly in patterns of three, he paced his deep and steady breaths, and felt the agitation gradually diminish. When he finally looked around, Melanie was right beside him. With her uncanny knack of being there for him, he greeted her with a very grateful thumbs-up gesture. She reached out and grasped his gloved hands.

  With their arms linked, they paddled in place and shared a buoyant moment, pausing to survey the subaquatic scenery. The play of the light in the crystal-clear water imbued all things with a fluid vibrancy. Dmitri’s first impressions were of the sun-lit clouds of translucent foam ascending from Melanie’s mouth, born of the same breath that animated her voice. The glistening, grape-bunch clusters of bubbles looked vaguely like jellyfish. With each breath, a new “jellyfish” spiraled lazily up to the surface.

  Although Dmitri estimated the visibility at more than one hundred feet, he was glad the whales were not to be seen. During his previous dives, he’d marveled at the rainbow schools of tropical fish feeding in the shallow coral reefs. Out here in the deep water, far from the coast, the sea seemed devoid of life, until a familiar figure loomed into view. After Gorman drifted over, he handed Dmitri a miniature video camera, jabbed an index finger into his chest, and then motioned straight down before scissoring away.

  Now that Gorman had issued him marching orders, Dmitri grappled with the buoyancy compensation control on the stabilization vest. Once he’d figured it out, he began a steady descent, trailing Melanie’s bubbly plume until they were submerged sixty feet directly beneath the Research in Paradise. At this location, he could hear and feel the vibrations from Seema’s game symbol synthesizer oozing from the underwater speakers.

  Dmitri stared up at the boat’s glass-bottom window, made opaque by the illuminated screen. Now he could actually see the same visual representations of the sounds on display in the control room beaming from the video projector aimed into the water. Directly above him, Chris and Lila were engaged in the procedure for calibrating the underwater video system. The zero-gravity, slow-motion scene reminded him of a popular video of Space Shuttle stronauts floating hypnotically above the earth during a Hubble Telescope repair mission.

  The current operation revolved around a daisy-chain relay ring of five individuals at five separate locations. Based upon Chris’s underwater video quality assessment of Seema’s game-symbol projections, he’d signal either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down gesture to Lila near the surface. She surfaced and repeated the same gesture up to Greg, who was leaning over the boat’s railing. He then relayed it to Andrew at the entrance to the control room. And after Andrew shouted the result to Seema inside, she would either increase or decrease the level of the projector’s current video control setting. The entire process was repeated until Chris had signed with a flattened palm, his signal to move on to the calibration of a different control.

  After a number of iterations and incremental adjustments to the projector’s focus, zoom, and illumination intensity controls, the results were spectacular. Dmitri marveled at the Speakeasy images of the game symbol frequencies, the circular shapes. Perhaps it was an optical illusion, an artifact of the virtual perspective created by Andrew’s 3D plotting routine, but as the light underwent multiple refractions across the cloth, glass, and water boundary layers, the ring-shaped images appeared to hover in the water, just below the glass.

  Gorman had entrusted Dmitri with the responsibility of capturing these spectacular moments. Aiming the video camera up at the glass bottom, Dmitri was startled by something bumping against his back. Since he was more than mildly fearful about sharing the same space with Uber, he turned around, fearing the worst. Sighting Melanie, he exhaled an effervescent sigh of relief. However, as he followed the vector of her outstretched arm, pointing straight down, his gut tensed. Uber’s colossal hulk appeared directly beneath them, gradually closing the distance. Melanie and Dmitri followed the lead of Lila and Chris, kicking rapidly away to give Uber a wide berth as he parked about twenty feet directly beneath their vessel.

  From the perspective of their new location, Dmitri could fully appreciate Uber’s immensity, power, and grace. He practically eclipsed the entire Research in Paradise, yet glided effortlessly with gentle beats of his aircraft-sized wing fins. So that he wouldn’t obscure their view of the
glass bottom, Dmitri and Melanie positioned themselves at an oblique angle, with Uber about fifty feet above them and some distance off to the right, with Lila and Chris the same distance over to the left. It was a bit too close for Dmitri’s comfort, but when he peered through the camera’s zoom lens he understood why this opportunity was worth the risk. Uber appeared to be transfixed by the shapes appearing on the screen, his curiosity obviously piqued. Dmitri could not imagine what the creature was experiencing.

  A sudden jolt, like a shockwave, shoved Dmitri sideways. Uber’s trumpeting vibrations had ruptured the silence of the depths. Dmitri’s torso shuddered as if he’d gripped a jackhammer. Once he’d acclimated to the novel sensations, it was his turn to experience what Gorman had previously described: the combination of a mild electric shock and a high-frequency massage, intensely pleasurable yet mildly uncomfortable, emanating from deep within his physical core.

  With a clear view of the screen, Dmitri witnessed a tour-de-force demonstration of Uber’s mental imaging powers. Speakeasy translated the giant’s rhythmic staccato tones into the circular game symbols—brilliant, incandescent rings glimmering in the cool, blue water. In rapid succession and in the perspective of 3D, Uber splashed them across the entire length, width, and virtual depth of the glass-bottom screen. As Dmitri filmed, his entire body resonated with the energy of Uber’s voice.

  * * *

  Greg observed the pyrotechnic display in the Speakeasy control room. “Are you getting this, Professor?” he shouted above Uber’s thundering voice.

  “He’s systematically filling the entire 3D game board with symbols up and down, left and right, in and out, like an automatic program,” replied McPinsky, his voice racing. “It’s spectacular. Stupendous! I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been sparked by the first glimpse of his own vocalizations.”